Fencing and/or walls

[phykell]

Hi!

I have two walls in my front garden. One is double thickness and is 5 bricks high with some awful 70's style decorative bricks. The other wall is single thickness with the same decorative bricks but is unstable because of the contruction method obviously. I want to sort them out but can't decide on the best course of action.

I think I should knock them down completely as even the double thickness wall looks terrible - the bricks are in a very bad condition with the faces falling off and they're bright red engineering bricks so they don't look so good anyway (my house is black timber looking frame and white tyrolean rendered). Currently I have no gates.

I think the options are:

a) rebuild the walls, both in double thickness, to a height of (say) 5 course) having a a few pillars so I can put in some wrought iron fencing, with nasty spikes to keep the neighbourhood kids from sitting on them! Also I can attach gates to the pillars.

I've had a quote for the walls, and the price was over £1,400, and that was without the cost of the bricks apparently!

b) Put in wooden fencing and have pillars built or use fencing posts to attach some gates to.

If (a) I would have to have someone do all the work for me.

If (b) I might be able to attempt some of it myself depending on time. If I knock the wall down to the footings though, how can I then dig down to put fence posts in? Would I need to hire a pneumatic drill or similar?

Can anyone shed some light on my problems and/or point me to any websites that have info on such stuff?

 

[david and julie]

If you are going to have a wrought iron fence why do you need a wall? presuming the wall is not holding back the soil that is.

The main cost for the wrought iron would be the top and bottom pierced flat bar and the arrow heads, plus the labour. The difference in cost between a fence 18" or 3 feet high would be negligible.(unless you were talking fancy hammered or twisted bar).

Bearing in mind the ammount of money you are talking about. I would suggest you get a wrought iron firm round for some suggestions and costings. A lot of them these days take a digital photo of your house/garden and use a cad set up to show you the different options. If you do take this option pay the extra for galvanising.

Yes you can hire a breaker to remove the footings from HSS or the like.